The Keep

The Keep, 1983. Directed by Michael Mann. Jurgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellan, Alberta Watson, Robert Prosky, Scott Glenn.

Somewhere along the way, Michael Mann has acquired a critical reputation as an important filmmaker. I can’t say that I like Mann’s films. Even the best of them--arguably Thief and Heat--leave me cold, if you’ll pardon the pun. The Keep, Mann’s ode to German Expressionism, is Mann’s worst film, but for me it is useful because it points out exactly what it is about Mann’s movies that I don’t like.

The Keep follows a cadre of German soldiers holed up in a keep in the Carpathian mountains. The keep is home to--something--that begins picking off the Nazis one by one. A local Jewish doctor is sent for to explain what is happening in the keep, with his daughter used as a hostage. The...presence...convinces the doctor that he will avenge the Jews of Europe if it is set free. Much head-scratching ensues. The original novel upon which this film is based is a fine, fine vampire novel (and why set a movie in the Carpathian mountains if you AREN’T going to make it a vampire movie), but director Mann, who also wrote the screenplay, was obviously convinced that he’s the second coming of Stanley Kubrick and--as Kubrick gutted The Shining--Mann guts Wilson’s novel to no good effect. Like Kubrick, Mann has no understanding of the conventions of the horror genre. He assembles his film from vague theories about how horror is supposed to work, but the way he assembles them is akin to someone translating a language using a textbook. The words are there, but the meaning is absent.

As a matter of practical film criticism, I must pause here for a second and recant all of the nasty things I said about Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. The Keep has largely the same intent as Sleepy Hollow--it’s an elaborate homage to the roots of the horror film--but its screenplay is such an idiotic mishmash that it makes the script for Sleepy Hollow look like the work of Ben Hecht or Charles Brackett in their prime. The thesis of the movie--and that’s what it is: a dry, academic thesis--is that the societal unease that gave rise to German Expressionism is the same societal unease that gave rise to fascism and genocide. "It’s bringing out the worst in us," the Nazi commander tells his SS political officer. "I’m you," the monster tells that same officer. None of which explains the business with monster-slaying savant that rushes to the keep from Greece or the whole business with the glowing flashlight-talisman that the doctor almost carries out of the keep or, indeed the almost-silent last thirty minutes of the film. The conclusion of the film is a confusing kaleidescope of lighting and optical effects and a monster that looks like a cross between The Golem, It: The Living Colosssus, and some of Jack Kirby’s balmier villains for DC Comics’ New Gods. The whole thing is laughable, all the moreso because a terrific cast--including Jurgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellan, Robert Prosky, Scott Glenn, and Alberta Watson--is trapped in the morass like bugs in amber.

Visually, portions of the film are very interesting indeed. The best scene, a scene the rest of the film doesn’t come anywhere near, a German soldier breaks through a wall. We see this from the other side of the wall and when the butt of the rifle breaks through, the camera dollies back from the inrush of light into a Lovecraftian void of darkness. The keep itself is a dismal, black, white, and gray refugee from Dr. Caligari and his children. The production design is impressive, no doubt, but Mann makes the same mistake here that he does with, say, Thief or Manhunter: he assumes that suffocating stylistics are sufficient to carry the movie. Only, here, he makes this mistake in spectacular, wide-world-of-sports agony of defeat fashion. This film skids off the ski-jump about halfway in and the remaining wreck unfolds in ghastly slow-motion.